Dismissing the unwanted train of thought, Chel returned her attention to the sample on her desk. VLG-01. The compound’s code name was bland, yet it had piqued her curiosity immediately. The ‘01’ designated it as the first formula from a new supplier, which was unprecedented in her experience. Potton’s additives were always sourced from the same handful of companies, with most products numbering in the high thousands. Who was this ‘VLG’?
The toxicology analysis had come back negative, unusually so in fact. No traces of carcinogens or impurities at all, unlike many of the borderline poisons she’d rubber-stamped for her paymasters. Suspecting an error, she had repeated the tests several times, always with the same results. The compound was clean. And yet she’d held off approving it. Results be damned, she didn’t trust that tarry slime. She’d felt a visceral aversion the moment she saw it, which had intensified with every test it evaded.
‘What are you hiding?’ she murmured. For better or worse, she’d uncovered part of the answer already, though it raised more questions than it settled. The compound had psychoactive properties, though nothing had shown up in the chem-tests. It had taken a more direct approach to unravel that particular secret…
Four nights ago she had administered three undiluted drops with a pipette, directly to her tongue, forgoing the customary infusion wafers or solutions employed by the company’s indentured tasters. It was a flagrant violation of protocol, never mind good sense. Indeed she couldn’t say why she’d done it. Part of it was her antipathy towards the sample – an unwillingness to let the damn thing beat her – but that wasn’t the whole of it. At some level it hadn’t been a decision at all.
I had to try it.
Chel shuddered, remembering the rancid sweetness that had infused her mouth, like the pulp of a rotten fruit. And beneath that, something other – a quality that had no parallel with any natural flavour, yet one she’d recognised in a heartbeat, like a buried memory that was eager to be exhumed.
We… know… you…
She frowned, unable to tell whether the slurred thought had been her own or a reverberation from something outside, slipping through her mind like an intruder. As she floundered, the liquid in the dish moved. Ripples spiralled from its centre, shaping the ooze into concentric ridges that persisted as the liquid flowed through them. Chel held her breath as a complex geometry of spines and petals coagulated before her eyes. It looked like a glistening black orchid.
Or a mandala, she realised, picturing the graffiti she’d seen earlier. This was another manifestation of that arcane form, but rendered in living fluid it captured the reality in a way paint never could.
The reality?
Chel leaned closer, fascinated. The liquid couldn’t actually be moving, though it had moved her to perceive the effect. This had to be another hallucination, but that didn’t make it meaningless. No, there was a message here. She felt sure of it.
As… within…
Once again she was struck by a sense of disconnection, as if the thought weren’t hers.
‘So without,’ she whispered, intuitively completing the verse.
With creeping slowness the mandala flexed within the dish, extending itself into a quivering corona of thorns. Reaching for her… Chel’s hand answered of its own accord, snatching up the container and bringing it to her mouth without recourse to thought. The flavour was exactly as she remembered it.
Distilled darkness.
Potton Vitapax was a sprawling complex of blocky buildings encrusted with pipes and cooling towers. A chain-link fence encircled it, topped with coils of razor wire. The Needleman walked its length patiently, looking for a way inside. It could smell its prey within, ripe for revelation.
Will you, won’t you prick out the lights and bleed the night anew? The ancient rhyme spun through the hunter’s mind as it searched. Whenever the holy fugue awoke it those words were waiting, vibrant with power. Will you, won’t you seek out the sighted and slash their little lies away?
Finally an opportunity presented itself. A burnt-out truck hunkered alongside a stretch of fence, its pallet piled high with ruptured barrels. In a healthy metropolis such a carcass wouldn’t be left to rot on the streets, but Carceri’s industrial quarter was a graveyard of dead machinery. Someday soon such relics would spill out across the entire city, mingling freely with the corpses of its creators.
Will you, won’t you shred the wiles of day and spread the seeds of wild decay?
The Needleman climbed the mound of canisters, picking its way around the runnels of oxidised gunk they’d vomited. The peak was almost level with the top of the fence. Throwing out its arms, the hunter leapt over the barrier and thudded down into the yard beyond, rolling into a crouch as it hit the ground. The impact was bone-jarring, but nothing broke, which was all that mattered. Later there would be pain, but–
Something growled nearby. The Needleman looked up as the growl exploded into a furious barking and a dog hurtled across the yard towards it. The animal’s body was a black-furred slab, bulked out with vat-grown muscles and ridged with augmetic implants. Serrated metal teeth glinted from its muzzle, like the jaws of a trap.
A spike of fear shot through the intruder, puncturing its fugue. Suddenly – horribly – it was mortal again. With a moan of terror, Skreech backed away then wailed as the hound’s jaws snapped shut around his left leg, just above the knee. Swinging its head about, the dog tore through leather and flesh to the bone beneath. Agony drowned out Skreech’s fear, threatening oblivion. He slashed at his attacker wildly, his finger-blades ripping red gouges through its pelt, but it paid no heed. The thing was a damn ward-dog! Its lobotomised brain was wired to ignore pain – maybe even get off on it.
‘Help me!’ Skreech begged the Night Below. ‘Help–’ He kicked out with his other leg and lost his balance. With a yelp he crashed onto his back. The hound was on top of him in an instant, its weight crushing his chest. Hot breath wafted from its jaws, reeking of decay and oil. He kept hacking at its flanks, but couldn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage. Drool spattered his iron veil as the dog snapped at it, trying to reach his throat. Fortunately his mask extended to his breastbone, presenting an impenetrable shield, but if its cord snapped he was done for.
Will you, won’t you tear my bloody throat out? Skreech thought frantically. Yes, you bloody will! He giggled, unable to resist the absurdity of the moment. To die like this, chewed up by a mindless beast, after achieving so much and coming so close to the end of days. It was so damn pointless!
And maybe that was the point…
A blissful serenity suffused him. Letting go, he sank back into the fugue as his severed self arose, eager to be about its business.
‘Will you?’ the Needleman asked the dog softly. With a sigh it flexed its arms and twisted them at the elbows – then again and yet again – contorting them to line up its blades at just the right angle. ‘Won’t you die for me?’
Then it set to work, stabbing and slicing in swift but unhurried strokes, its blades flicking about in perfect synchronicity, instinctively finding and following the fault lines in their subject’s flesh, severing tendons, arteries and circuitry in a symphony of evisceration, delving deeper with every pointed note. The dog whimpered and its eyes glazed over as some vital connection inside was ruptured. Blood and smoke spewed from its jaws; then it shuddered and slumped forward into death.
‘Yes, you will,’ the Needleman purred. Its joints cracking loudly, it realigned its arms and thrust the carcass aside, then rose unsteadily. Organs flopped from its blood-drenched coat. Despite the eloquence of the butchery it had been messy work, unbefitting of the herald’s sublime calling, but that indignity was trivial beside the damage done to its leg. The dog had gnawed deep into the bone. Blood was pumping vigorously from the wound, threatening to bleed the hunter out.
Ignoring the pain, the Needleman cut a strip from the hem of its coat and b
ound the wound tightly. Without proper attention the leg would likely be lost, but that was irrelevant for now. It was still more or less functional. That would suffice to fulfil this night’s obligation.
Looking up, the herald glared at the smirking totem atop the refinery. The colossal tin-can god appeared to mock it, revelling in the damage its guardian beast had inflicted. They embodied opposing creeds in the secret war for the city’s soul, yet both had arisen from the same primal sickness, albeit from different strains – one seeded by Greed, the other by Fear. No matter how far humanity journeyed from its wellspring, its innate curses would go with it and find fertile soil to fester.
‘You lie to them,’ the Needleman rebuked its rival. ‘I tell only truth.’
Dismissing the crass idol, it limped towards the nearest building. The vastness of the complex would be no obstacle, for the hunter was connected to its ordained prey by an intangible yet unbreakable cord. It simply had to follow the thread.
Chel felt light-headed, yet paradoxically lucid, as though her body had receded, leaving her senses at the fore. The world around her appeared tenuous and transient, as though it were merely one possibility among many, its persistence entirely contingent upon her conviction in it. She understood this was an extension of the state she had been experiencing for days, heightened by the extra dose of the drug she’d swallowed.
I was blind. Now I see.
She was walking the snarl of gantries overlooking Block-D, which housed a sweeping expanse of storage vats. Vita Ephemera swirled languidly in the open-topped containers below, churned by fans to prevent it from congealing. It was all coarse grey gloop, still awaiting processing into the garbage her masters passed off as food. Siphoning pipes protruded from every vat, connected to testing stations above. Part of her job was to conduct regular hygiene checks on the stock. While the company’s nutritional standards were pitiful, actually poisoning its consumers wouldn’t be profitable.
We might kill them, Chel reflected, but we’ll do it slowly.
During the day the refinery would be packed with labourers, which was why the company had her working nights, tucked away while production went on. Other than a couple of watchmen she was alone in the complex. But she didn’t feel alone now. In fact she felt crowded, as though the place were teeming with unseen people.
Not people. Not any more.
Chel halted and gazed down at the grey pools, studying them with an honesty she’d never allowed herself before. This place was haunted, but its shades weren’t true ghosts. They were too diffuse and degraded for that, their spirits dissolved alongside their bodies, blended into an aggregate spectral sludge.
Processed like sewage.
Once she accepted the truth she began to see the dead, swirling through the gloop in tides of distended, melded faces and groping hands. They were hollow-eyed and hopeless, bereft of sense or sanity, yet suffering all the same. It wasn’t just flesh and blood the city recycled and shovelled into its poor.
We’ve turned them into soul-eaters.
Chel realised she was crying, but she didn’t try to stop the tears falling into the grey swirl below. It was already contaminated beyond anything she could offer, tainted though she was. There was no denying her guilt, of course. Ignorance couldn’t acquit her collaboration, especially when it was wilful.
‘I knew,’ she confessed to the dead. ‘I’ve always known.’
Somewhere far away, the fading fantasy of her old self railed against the admission. This wasn’t – couldn’t be – real! It was just another drug-fuelled delusion, like her nightmares. She wasn’t herself – hadn’t been since she’d taken that first, fateful dose. Why else would she have swallowed more of the damned thing?
They were tempting denials, but they were still lies and she was past humouring them. The narcotic wasn’t an engine of delirium, but revelation, and once the taste was acquired there was no going back. The change it engendered in the brain, perhaps even the spirit, was permanent. She grasped that viscerally, with both regret and relief, but above all curiosity. Why would anyone create such a provocative substance, let alone seek to spread it among the city’s forsaken? Why wake them up to the horror of their existence? It was those questions that had led her here. She needed to find the sample’s source container. Perhaps it would offer a clue as to its creators.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered.
‘Doc?’ someone asked behind her. She turned, unsurprised, as though she’d always known the man was there. He was in his late sixties, but his back was straight and his shoulders broad. The face under his cap was like carved mahogany, leavened by bushy white brows and lively eyes.
‘Sergeant,’ Chel answered. She didn’t know the watchman’s name. Everybody just called him The Sergeant, the same way they called her The Doc. It was rumoured he’d been in the military in his younger days. There was a laconic authority about him that supported that, yet he was an affable fellow. They’d shared the occasional mug of caff, even played cards once. Regarding him with her new-found clarity, Chel realised he might even have become a friend of sorts, if she’d been open to such things.
‘You see something down there?’ he asked, his eyes sweeping the refinery floor. ‘Something off?’
‘Nothing that wasn’t there before.’
He frowned. ‘You all right, doc?’
‘I don’t know.’ She was unwilling to lie any more, even for convenience.
‘You got the look tonight,’ he gauged, taking a step closer.
‘The look?’
‘Thousand-yard stare. Like yer seein’ right through things.’
Chel lowered her eyes, unsettled by the observation.
‘Maybe a brew to perk you up?’ he suggested gently.
‘Another time, sergeant.’ Then a thought occurred to her. ‘But there’s something you could help me with.’ She showed him her data-slate. ‘I’m looking for this warehouse.’ The stock manifest had identified where the VLG-01 was stored, but she’d been going round in circles trying to find it.
‘Yeah, I know the place,’ the watchman said, squinting at the slate. ‘Ain’t used much these days.’
‘Can you show me?’
He raised an eyebrow, weighing her up. Though the warehouses weren’t off limits to her, it was an unusual request.
‘Please, sergeant. It’s important.’
He held her gaze a moment longer, then nodded. ‘Okay, good enough for me. This way.’
Getting inside the complex had been easy. The first door the Needleman tried was unlocked and unguarded. The worst of the refinery’s security was probably behind it, but haste had already cost it gravely so the intruder proceeded cautiously. Not that speed was an option any more. Its mauled leg had become a dead weight, trailing behind it as it crept through a maze of vats. Every step sent slivers of pain up its leg, threatening to break its equilibrium, but blood loss was a more pressing concern. The crude tourniquet had staunched the flow somewhat, but without stitches the bleeding wouldn’t stop. Unfortunately, despite its name, that craft was alien to the Needleman. Its vocation was dissolution, not restoration.
This body is failing, it judged, accepting the conclusion without emotion. It was of little consequence. Another herald would take its place – perhaps many others. After all, its kind was legion.
A clatter of footsteps approached from somewhere overhead. The hunter pressed itself against a vat as a pair of figures appeared on the gantry above – a man in a grey uniform and… The Needleman smiled, recognising its prey. There was a new vibrancy about the woman, as though her potential had bloomed since their last encounter. It could hope for no finer offering for its final sacrifice.
‘Will you, won’t you bleed to feed the night?’ it whispered.
The cord between them grew taut as the woman passed by, tugging the hunter after her. Relenting, it shadowed the pair as they crossed t
he concourse then fell back when they descended a stairway to its level.
‘This is the one,’ the watchman said, grabbing the handle of a heavy door. It creaked in protest when he yanked it open, like nails raking metal. ‘Like I said, ain’t used much.’
‘Why?’ the woman asked.
‘Can’t rightly say.’ He shook his head. ‘Some places… They just don’t work out.’
Lights flickered on in the chamber beyond when they entered. The Needleman took ten long breaths then followed. It wouldn’t be long now…
Her quarry was on the far side of the warehouse, lurking in a shadowed corner. There was no mistaking it. Vast and dark, the barrel loomed over its fellow containers like a cylindrical monolith. Its dark body was girdled with broad iron bands and massive rivets.
Like a cage, Chel thought, approaching the vessel warily. It was almost twice her height, yet that wasn’t what unsettled her. No, it was the age radiating from it – a deep and baleful antiquity that seemed to diminish everything around it.
‘This what yer after?’ her guide asked, speaking quietly, as though afraid of waking the slumbering giant.
‘Yes. Have you seen anything like it before?’ Chel asked, already knowing the answer.
‘No,’ the sergeant whispered. ‘No, I ain’t.’
Chel realised he was hanging back. His stubborn vitality had drained away, yet there was steel in his eyes. This was a man who’d faced down fear before. Why had she never taken the time to learn his story?
‘You can go, sergeant,’ she said, releasing him from whatever vague obligation he felt towards her. This wasn’t his problem.
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